Review: Nokia Lumia 930

If there’s no 4G, WiFi will provide solid speeds at home, especially if you have an 802.11ac router working in your homestead, with an increase on the typical 802.11n networks many phones have, including this one’s predecessor, the Lumia 920 and 925.

This will support 802.11n for those of you with older routers, and it performs well here too, but the inclusion of 802.11ac means updated home networks get the benefit of faster speeds.

We’re a touch concerned by the battery life, though, because while the bigger Lumia 1520 manages two days of life from its 3400mAh battery and Full HD screen, the Lumia 930’s 2420mAh battery and Full HD AMOLED display bring that back down to a single day.

Our tests brought us a full day, and if we had tried, we could probably have found closer to a day and a half, but you’ll want to charge nightly if you’re taking photos, reading and writing emails, surfing the web, making phone calls, playing the odd game, and engaging in that whole social networking thing, which is what we did throughout our test of the Nokia Lumia 930.

That difference in battery life is likely due to the battery size and the Full HD screen, with the Lumia 1520’s 1000mAh bigger battery able to offer more juice for the different screen type.

But for the most part, this is Nokia’s 6 inch phablet shrunk down to a more acceptable 5 inch size, with near identical specs and performance, except for the aforementioned battery life.

It’s even the same camera, with the excellent 20 megapixel PureView shooter moved to a smaller body.

Just like in the Lumia 1520, every photo you take can be captured in both the 20 megapixel original if in 4:3, or at 16 megapixels in the more commonly used 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. And every time you capture that shot, it will save a 5 megapixel photo, essentially giving you a few levels of zoom whereby the sensor will be cropped to bring you closer, making use of digital zoom in a way that doesn’t just blow up pixels.

Nokia’s current generation of PureView means the camera doesn’t protrude from the body at all, either, not even in the slight way that it did in the Lumia 1020’s 40 megapixel camera and the hint of an extrusion in the Lumia 1520, with the lens flush against the back in the 930 and sitting below a dual LED flash.

Shots from the camera are often excellent, too, providing quite a bit of detail in the high resolution originals, and enough to work with in the 5 megapixel versions ready for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and emailing.

In daylight, the camera shines, with a relatively fast shutter on the touchscreen or a firm push of the physical button on the side of the handset, while night time images are surprisingly vibrant provided you hold the camera very still when the shot is firing.

But if you’re not particularly still, you’ll find blur in night shots in automatic mode, and not in a good way.

If automatic isn’t your style, just like the Lumia 1020 and 1520, a manual mode can be employed, complete with shutter speed and ISO control, making it ideal for the photographers who actually know what they’re doing and want a smartphone camera to be used in much the same way their real camera would be.

Enthusiast photographers will even be impressed with the quality on offer, because just like other PureView Nokia cameras, there’s an option for Digital Negative here, also known as the Adobe version of a RAW photo, beating JPEG hands down on quality. You won’t get that crop-to-zoom feature with DNG switched on, but if you like high quality photos, it’s a winning feature.

The front camera isn’t as high a shooter as some of the others out there, though, but it’s spot on with the Lumia 1520 also, featuring a 1.2 megapixel sensor for those selfies and the odd spot of video conferencing.

But why is the memory fixed, with no way of upgrading the storage past its preset size?

We thought Nokia had learned its lesson in the Lumia 1520, because a microSD slot is available in that model, and it’s a useful way of upgrading the storage in so many other Nokia smartphones, most of which aren’t flagship models and take up lesser spots in the Nokia range.

But not here. Not in the Nokia’s flagship 5 inch handset.

That means you’re stuck with 32GB of storage for your apps, games, movies, photos, and music, and just like how it was in the Lumia 1020, that is beyond frustrating, because if you’re going to take photos and videos on an excellent camera — which the Lumia 930 certainly has — why would you stop it from growing beyond its basic 32GB, from letting you take advantage of the ridiculous amount of space a minor microSD upgrade can provide?

Why, Nokia? Why?!

One other quibble is with the body, because it’s a design not all will go for.

In the flesh, it’s kind of like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 of smartphones, with a silver metal edge complete with crossing accents, and yet set around a colourful body like in the old Nokia style. We say old, but what we really mean is from the Lumia smartphones, with a soft yet bright colourful polycarbonate that is impossible to ignore due to how vibrant it is.

On our review model, that colour was green, bright fluorescent green, but you can choose between just-as-bright orange, ridiculously white white, and of course black.

Maybe it’s just us, but the green didn’t cut it for us, not in the way that the yellow Lumia 1020 or 1520 did, nor the way some of the red and blue Lumia handsets we’ve seen in the past looked.

I mean, have we seriously run out of primary colours that we need to start dabbling in blinding shades? Maybe so. Maybe so.

Conclusion

With every generation of Nokia 9 series, we see the best in class four-to-five incher that the company can come up with, and just like previous 900’s, the Lumia 930 is right now the best Nokia you can have without owning a 6 inch phone.

But if we had to choose, we’d say to go for Nokia’s 6 inch 1520, because with practically identical technology under the hood AND the ability to expand on the storage plus better battery life, it beats the 930 hands down.